Visitation

A stunning novel about the illusion of ownership -- Tom Sutcliffe * Saturday Review, BBC Radio 4 * One of the finest, most exciting authors alive... In Visitation, the achievement and resonance are massive... The amount of emotional engagement Erpenbeck manages to win from us, in a mere 150 pages, is just one proof of her mastery. An extraordinarily strong book by a major German author, ingeniously translated, produced with love. -- Michel Faber * Guardian * Visitation has the epic trajectory of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks. This impressive achievement is a deeply engaging panorama of Germany's troubling 20th-century history. * Financial Times * This haunting novel beautifully dramatises how ordinary lives are affected by history. -- Kate Saunders * The Times * A powerful novel ...in which epic events are contrasted with, and told through, the repetitive, almost rhythmical processes that make up seemingly ordinary lives ... Visitation cannot have been an easy book to translate, but Susan Bernofsky masters its occasional glints of poetry ... Visitation is an important work by a novelist of great talent. -- James Copnall * Times Literary Supplement * Ambitiously shows the fleetingness of memory, that we are all transient -- Deborah Moggach Love, death and passion, from the Weimar Republic to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Wonderful German prose. * Playboy * Fascinating -- John Carey A strangely ethereal fairy tale of the Reich-scarred, Stasi-suppressed era and its lingering hangover... A Brandenburg lake house proves to be a memorable courtroom for this arbitration into the lives of others. * Independent on Sunday * It is hard to say exactly what the secret of this novel is and where its brilliance, impact and eminent drama come from. One thing is certain: Jenny Erpenbeck has created her masterpiece. * Leipzig Prize jury * It's more unsettling than one might imagine for a work of fiction to preoccupy itself with continuity of place rather than of character. When that place is outside Berlin, and the time the past fraught hundred years: even more so. Jenny Erpenbeck's Visitation is one of the most pleasingly disturbing novels I've read in a long time. -- Emily Barton, author of "The Testament of Yves Gundron" Jenny Erpenbeck's small novel is full of human destinies large and small * Glamour * Visitation is a master-class in the craft and power of short fiction. ... Erpenbeck's language is of a pared back poetry. Simple sentences build in power when reappearing refrain-like and colours reverberate to effect ... The evocative and the restless rub shoulders in this showcase of how substantial brevity can be. -- Rebecca K Morrison * Independent * This haunting novel distils the strife that tore Germany apart over the last century into the framework of one house in Brandenburg ... Erpenbeck, born in East Germany, based her intensely visual novel on the house in which she grew up and, in the space of 150 pages, concentrates a century of history. -- Clare Colvin * Daily Mail * The writing is beautiful, without so much as a superfluous word. -- Jennifer Lipman * Jewish Chronicle * A powerful novel ...in which epic events are contrasted with, and told through, the repetitive, almost rhythmical processes that make up seemingly ordinary lives ... Visitation cannot have been an easy book to translate, but Susan Bernofsky masters its occasional glints of poetry ... Visitation is an important work by a novelist of great talent. -- James Copnall * TLS * A minimalist masterpiece in which a story about a lakeside house in Brandenburg, along with its successive occupants, becomes the conduit for a journey through Germany's 20th-century history. * Financial Times 'Books of the Year' * Over the past 10 years, Jenny Erpenbeck has gained a reputation as one of Germany's most adventurous young writers, exploring personal and national secrets through allegory (The Old Child) and fable (The Bo

Jenny Erpenbeck is the author of The Old Child & The Book of Words (2008), Visitation (2010) and The End of Days (2014, winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize), and Go, Went, Gone (2017), all published by Portobello. Her fiction is published in twenty-six languages. Susan Bernofsky has translated works by Robert Walser, Hermann Hesse, Gregor von Rezzori, Yoko Tawada, Ludwig Harig and Franz Kafka. She is the author of Foreign Words: Translator-Authors in the Age of Goethe and is currently at work on a biography of Robert Walser. Her translation of The Old Child and Other Stories was awarded the 2006 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize.